On Avoiding Emoticons

From Wikipedia:

It’s hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss’s instant-messaging client was rendering the “(k)” as a big pair of red smoochy lips.[8]

Eddie’s in the Onion.

That’s it, really.
Oh: Except there’s a comment after the interview that Americans always pronounce his name wrong. “It’s Iz_Ard. Doesn’t rhyme with Lizard.”
We *have* to pronounce it wrong, unless we want to have the “invokes Linus Torvalds” problem. We’re Americans. It’s either “rhymes with lizard” (“IZerd”) or “talk like a pirate” (izARRRD), because we sound pretentious to ourselves if we pronounce it “izAHD.”
‘Course, “invokes Linus Torvalds” partly pissed me off because so few people care about pronouncing words that are not Amer-English. The fact that we’re at war in eyeRACK is witheringly embarrassing. If we’re having a war in their country we should at least pronounce it eeRAHK. How come we just make up names for other places? Those places have names. Perfectly good ones. Good enough for the people who live there. Turin/Torino was a good example—we should have been calling it Torino all along. How pissed off would we be if the Dutch addressed all their Brooklyn mail to Nieuw Amsterdam, NY?

Feel the burn. (Or not.)

I got takeout from Wasabi[1] for lunch today[2].
Chicken with “herb salad”[3] and a spicy tuna scallion roll.
Got back to the office and realized they had left something out.
Guess what they didn’t give me.

Hint: It starts with a “w”.

[1] I’d link to their site, but it’s a seasick Flash experience.
[2] I know we said we were done with them, but I’m trying not to eat wheat lately[4], so my options are limited.
[3] This is, as far as I can tell, mesclun mix. They should change the name of the salad (see below, “Crouton Madness”) unless they intend the word to be taken in its botanical sense (that is, “This salad is made from tender-stemmed plants, not wood”), rather than its culinary sense (“Tastier than lettuce!”). How hard is it, for crying out loud? I know they have a kitchen. I know they have shiso. I bet they have cilantro, too, because they are all about fusion. Just throw some herbs in the salad, already!
[4] I’ve been feeling marginally less well than usual for a while now, and my brainstem says that wheat is a major contributor to the less-wellness. I’m not completely eliminating it—Barbara got me a French mixed-fruit tart for my work anniversary on Monday and I did not say nay—but I’m trying to demote it from “staple” to “treat”.

Flotsam

(1) A2 + B2 = Opportunity2
This is a slogan on a billboard (is it really a billboard if it’s not gigantic/on a roadside?) at Farragut North. It makes me pause every morning. I don’t think I like it, but I do enjoy the mental sensation of trying to figure out what the factors of opportunity might be. From a marketing perspective it’s a failure: I know it’s promoting math and science, but I don’t know why or by whom.

(2) Joke I heard from Scot the Viking:
Q: In an elevator [in Finland, presumably], how do you tell an introverted Finn from an extroverted Finn?
A: The introvert is looking at his own shoes. The extrovert is looking at someone else’s shoes.

(3) Teenage girl suicides are on the rise. This opens a giant chasm of fury in me, rage at our culture, fear of powerlessness to protect my beloveds from the forces around them. Don’t really have anything else to say about that. Just the chasm. Of fury. (And flippantly: This is what happens when there’s no Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television…)

(4) Belief-o-Matic: For some reason, belief.net comes up first in the Google search for the article above. The site also features the Belief-o-Matic, a nice questionnaire that in my case was spot-on. Oddly reassuring: “Yep, that’s the religion for me, all right!”

I need a new guru.

I just had the thought “Jakob Nielsen is dead to me.” It’s only about half true, though.

I’m thinking a lot about web design and usability, and while he absolutely understands usability, he wouldn’t see design if it came up and bit him in the face.

[Postscript: It looks like better designers have prevailed: The highly usable but horribly ugly UseIt.com now redirects to the Nielsen Norman Group website, which has an actual aesthetic.]

Crouton Madness

I want people to stop calling things “Caesar Salad” that are not Caesar Salad.
Chopped romaine with pre-shredded parmesan cheese and this odd assortment of croutons (I’m looking at pumpernickel, rye, and some kind of multigrain) is not a Caesar Salad.
I’m sure a pumpernickel crouton in its natural habitat is a fine thing, but what I wanted was a Caesar Salad and I have not gotten it.

I think my basic objection here is the Martini Problem.
I like complex nomenclature. Language differentiates things by using different names for them. That’s what language is for. That’s why we have it. If you make something new, you should make up a new name for it. That’s how we got all those great cocktail names, like Singapore Sling and Rusty Nail and Hoptoad. Just serving it in a martini glass (which, incidentally, is also called a “cocktail glass”) and putting “-tini” on the end is a mediocrity-driven nomenclature cop-out, which impoverishes and demeans our language.

So, for example, if this lunch object were called a “Daily Market Romaine Salad”, I’d be fine. I probably wouldn’t have bought it, but I wouldn’t be feeling all unfulfilled.